Looking Up: Drone Safety
Before you take off for flight, be sure that you know these tips to remain safety conscious.
Look up in the sky these days, and you are likely to assume that any unmanned aerial vehicle zooming through the sky is a drone rather than a UFO. But as this technology has become more commonplace, the safety and regulations around it seem to have lagged. Their popularity poses serious questions about what we are doing to make drones safer.
Rising Concern
A recent incident in the UK pointed to the increasing tension between drones and safety when there was a reported near-miss between a drone and a passenger plane in Cornwall. While a collision didn’t actually happen, the drone should not have been in that airspace at all without clearance from the authorities, and officials reported the drone as they believed it posed a threat.
As The Guardian quoted Stephen Landells, a flight safety specialist with the British Airline Pilots Association (Balpa), saying, the choice to fly a drone in commercial airspace is “extremely dangerous”, and “Anybody who does it is risking people’s lives, as well as a prison sentence.” Landells added: “The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) is due to launch an education program for amateur drone users which we fully support and we hope will get the message across to the casual user of the dangers of flying irresponsibly.”
Traffic Jams
This incident reflects a growing concern among pilots, who say that a drone collision is becoming increasingly likely with the number of aircrafts in the sky. Drones awkwardly sit in a middle ground of regulation, as Mashable points out: “Drones are too small and numerous to be regulated like aircraft, but capable enough to be a huge hassle.” So what’s being done to address drone safety in high risk areas such as dense urban centers and near airports? If you look at the primary trends, most of them rely on user responsibility.
Possible Solution
North America’s largest drone maker 3DR has been innovating in this space, having recently rolled out a partnership with AirMap, which provides digital flight zone information. On the company’s blog, they announced the partnership by writing that “3DR will integrate AirMap’s safety information software into its Solo smart drone app … It’s the first time that drone software has been able to directly deliver reliable safety information to users.” The partnership is designed to make flying drones as safe as it is easy.
Another example is the startup Flock, which uses AI to assess the safety of flying around an urban environment. As Mashable reported, “Flock works by licensing data about the position of buildings, people and cars in cities, in addition to weather conditions. Then it enters that into its risk assessment platform, which can calculate whether it’s safe or not to fly.”
Flock is located in the UK, whereas AirMap is based in the US where regulations around flying drones are much more stringent. Amazon has signaled that it will be researching the feasibility of a drone delivery service in the UK for just that reason. Looking into the necessary safety precautions of such a service, Amazon wrote on its blog that “A cross-Government team supported by the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has provided Amazon with permissions to explore three key innovations: beyond line of sight operations in rural and suburban areas, testing sensor performance to make sure the drones can identify and avoid obstacles, and flights where one person operates multiple highly-automated drones.”
While it’s clear that technology is progressing in this space, one of the biggest concerns is the need to increase awareness of the responsibility that drone operators have. Just because a piece of technology is easy to use doesn’t mean it does not come with a tremendous amount of responsibility.